Quotes By Karl Marx

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.

Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.

All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work.

So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.

The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.

As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.

The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.

Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.

The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed.

History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.

Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.